Spain

Abstract

After the Spanish civil war (1936)(1937)(1938)(1939) and the authoritarian regime of General Franco, democracy arrived to Spain with the Constitution of 1978 (Edles 1998). Until then, there were few regulations in CSR-related areas: the level of intervention of the state in the economy was high and there was a large number of state-owned companies. Being a parliamentary monarchy, Spain evolved slowly until it joined the European Economic Community in 1986, which was an important step forward. Thereafter, many Spanish companies were privatized and they began internationalization processes-which are usually costly (Richter 2014;Richter et al. 2016;Castillo-Apraiz et al. 2019, 2020Arzubiaga et al. 2020)-across the European boarders and to Latin America (Galan and Gonzalez-Benito 2006).Nowadays, Spain is a developed country (Vives 2015; Šćepanović 2019). Spanish small and medium-sized firms' productivity is very close to the average of the EU-28 (Instituto Nacional de Estadística 2016). In fact, the Spanish economy is slowly returning to levels measured in the years before the economic crisis. This phenomenon is evidenced by a constantly growing GDP (World Bank 2018). Specifically, Spanish GDP growth rate in 2018 was 2.35% (World Bank 2018). This recovery is to a large extent the result of good economic outcomes of small and